Tag Archives: Amazon

If you are one of the many who tend to binge-watch streaming shows, you’ve likely already enjoyed Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. This new comedy focuses on a young wife and mother living in New York City in 1958, when men worked and women tended to, well, not work.

After her husband leaves her, Mrs. Maisel chooses stand-up comedy over therapy — or you could say stand-up comedy chooses her. The show takes place in a few New York neighborhoods, including the toney Upper West Side, the Garment District and the Village. The storyline brings real-life characters into this fictional world — Midge Maisel studies by listening to Red Foxx comedy albums, and she also befriends comic Lenny Bruce, who appears in a number of episodes.

Lesley Robson-Foster on set.

The show, created by Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino, is colorful and bright and features a significant amount of visual effects — approximately 80 per episode.

How early did you get involved in Mrs. Maisel?
The producer Dhana Gilbert brought my producer Parker Chehak and I in early to discuss feasibility issues, as this is a period piece and to see if Amy and Dan liked us! We’ve been on since the pilot.

What did the creators/showrunners say they needed?
They needed 1958 New York City, weather changes and some very fancy single-shot blending. Also, some fantasy and magic realism.

As you mentioned, this is a period piece, so I’m assuming a lot of your work is based on that.
The big period shots in Season 1 are the Garment District reconstruction. We shot on 19th Street between 5th and 6th — the brilliant production designer Bill Groom did 1/3 of the street practically and VFX took care of the rest, such as crowd duplication and CG cars and crowds. Then we shot on Park Avenue and had to remove the Met Life building down near Grand Central, and knock out anything post-1958.

We also did a major gag with the driving footage. We shot driving plates around the Upper West Side and had a flotilla of period-correct cars with us, but could not get rid of all the parked cars. My genius design partner on the show Douglas Purver created a wall of parked period CG cars and put them over the modern ones. Phosphene then did the compositing.

What other types of effects did you provide?
Amy and Dan — the creators and showrunners — haven’t done many VFX shows, but they are very, very experienced. They write and ask for amazing things that allow me to have great fun. For example, I was asked to make a shot where our heroine is standing inside a subway car, and then the camera comes hurtling backwards through the end of the carriage and then sees the train going away down the tunnel. All we had was a third of a carriage with two and a half walls on set. Douglas Purver made a matte painting of the tunnel, created a CG train and put it all together.

Can you talk about the importance of being on set?
For me being on set is everything. I talk directors out of VFX shots and fixes all day long. If you can get it practically you should get it practically. It’s the best advice you’ll ever give as a VFX supervisor. A trust is built that you will give your best advice, and if you really need to shoot plates and interrupt the flow of the day, then they know it’s important for the finished shot.

Having a good relationship with every department is crucial.

Can you give an example of how being on set might have saved a shot or made a shot stronger?
This is a character-driven show. The directors really like Steadicam and long, long shots following the action. Even though a lot of the effects we want to do really demand motion control, I know I just can’t have it. It would kill the performances and take up too much time and room.

I run around with string and tennis balls to line things up. I watch the monitors carefully and use QTake to make sure things line up within acceptable parameters.

In my experience you have to have the production’s best interests at heart. Dhana Gilbert knows that a VFX supervisor on the crew and as part of the team smooths out the season. They really don’t want a supervisor who is intermittent and doesn’t have the whole picture. I’ve done several shows with Dhana; she knows my idea of how to service a show with an in-house team.

You shot b-roll for this? What camera did you use, and why?
We used a Blackmagic Ursa Mini Pro. We rented one on The OA for Netflix last year and found it to be really easy to use. We liked that’s its self-contained and we can use the Canon glass from our DSLR kits. It’s got a built-in monitor and it can shoot RAW 4.6K. It cut in just fine with the Alexa Mini for establishing shots and plates. It fits into a single backpack so we could get a shot at a moment’s notice. The user interface on the camera is so intuitive that anyone on the VFX team could pick it up and learn how to get the shot in 30 minutes.

What VFX houses did you employ, and how do you like to work with them?
We keep as much as we can in New York City, of course. Phosphene is our main vendor, and we like Shade and Alkemy X. I like RVX in Iceland, El Ranchito in Spain and Rodeo in Montreal. I also have a host of secret weapon individuals dotted around the world. For Parker and I, it’s always horses for courses. Whom we send the work to depends on the shot.

For each show we build a small in-house team — we do the temps and figure out the design, and shoot plates and elements before shots leave us to go to the vendor.

You’ve worked on many critically acclaimed television series. Television is famous for quick turnarounds. How do you and your team prepare for those tight deadlines?
Television schedules can be relentless. Prep, shoot and post all at the same time. I like it very much as it keeps the wheels of the machine oiled. We work on features in between the series and enjoy that slower process too. It’s all the same skill set and workflow — just different paces.

If you have to offer a production a tip or two about how to make the process go more smoothly, what would it be?
I would say be involved with EVERYTHING. Keep your nose close to the ground. Really familiarize yourself with the scripts — head trouble off at the pass by discussing upcoming events with the relevant person. Be fluid and flexible and engaged!

How do you describe Amazon’s Mozart in the Jungle? Well, in its most basic form it’s a comedy about the changing of the guard — or maestro — at the New York Philharmonic, and the musicians that make up that orchestra. When you dig deeper you get a behind-the-scenes look at the back-biting and crazy that goes on in the lives and heads of these gifted artists.

Timothy Vincent

Based on the novel Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music by oboist Blair Tindall, the series — which won the Golden Globe last year and was nominated this year — has shot in a number of locations over its three seasons, including Mexico and Italy.

Since its inception, Mozart in the Jungle has been finishing in 4K and streaming in both SDR and HDR. We recently reached out to Technicolor’s senior color timer, Timothy Vincent, who has been on the show since the pilot to find out more about the show’s color workflow.

Did Technicolor have to gear up infrastructure-wise for the show’s HDR workflow?
We were doing UHD 4K already and were just getting our HDR workflows worked out.

What is the workflow from offline to online to color?
The dailies are done in New York based on the Alexa K1S1 709 LUT. (Technicolor On-Location Services handled dailies out of Italy, and Technicolor PostWorks in New York.) After the offline and online, I get the offline reference made with the dailies so I can look at if I have a question about what was intended.

If someone was unsure about watching in HDR versus SDR, what would you tell them?
The emotional feel of both the SDR and the HDR is the same. That is always the goal in the HDR pass for Mozart. One of the experiences that is enhanced in the HDR is the depth of field and the three-dimensional quality you gain in the image. This really plays nicely with the feel in the landscapes of Italy, the stage performances where you feel more like you are in the audience, and the long streets of New York just to name a few.

When I’m grading the HDR version, I’m able to retain more highlight detail than I was in the SDR pass. For someone who has not yet been able to experience HDR, I would actually recommend that they watch an episode of the show in SDR first and then in HDR so they can see the difference between them. At that point they can choose what kind of viewing experience they want. I think that Mozart looks fantastic in both versions.

What about the “look” of the show. What kind of direction where you given?
We established the look of the show based on conversations and collaboration in my bay. It has always been a filmic look with soft blacks and yellow warm tones as the main palette for the show. Then we added in a fearlessness to take the story in and out of strong shadows. We shape the look of the show to guide the viewers to exactly the story that is being told and the emotions that we want them to feel. Color has always been used as one of the storytelling tools on the show. There is a realistic beauty to the show.

What was your creative partnership like with the show’s cinematographer, Tobias Datum?
I look forward to each episode and discovering what Tobias has given me as palette and mood for each scene. For Season 3 we picked up where we left off at the end of Season 2. We had established the look and feel of the show and only had to account for a large portion of Season 3 being shot in Italy. Making sure to feel the different quality of light and feel of the warmth and beauty of Italy. We did this by playing with natural warm skin tones and the contrast of light and shadow he was creating for the different moods and locations. The same can be said for the two episodes in Mexico in Season 2. I know now what Tobias likes and can make decisions I’m confident that he will like.

From a director and cinematographer’s point of view, what kind of choices does HDR open up creatively?
It depends on if they want to maintain the same feel of the SDR or if they want to create a new feel. If they choose to go in a different direction, they can accentuate the contrast and color more with HDR. You can keep more low-light detail while being dark, and you can really create a separate feel to different parts of the show… like a dream sequence or something like that.

Any workflow tricks/tips/trouble spots within the workflow or is it a well-oiled machine at this point?
I have actually changed the way I grade my shows based on the evolution of this show. My end results are the same, but I learned how to build grades that translate to HDR much easier and consistently.

Do you have a color assistant?
I have a couple of assistants that I work with who help me with prepping the show, getting proxies generated, color tracing and some color support.

What tools do you use — monitor, software, computer, scope, etc.?
I am working on Autodesk Lustre 2017 on an HP Z840, while monitoring on both a Panasonic CZ950 and a Sony X300. I work on Omnitek scopes off the downconverter to 2K. The show is shot on both Alexa XT and Alexa Mini, framing for 16×9. All finishing is done in 4K UHD for both SDR and HDR.

Anything you would like to add?
I would only say that everyone should be open to experiencing both SDR and HDR and giving themselves that opportunity to choose which they want to watch and when.

Director/editor Bill Yukich helmed the film noir-ish opening title sequence for Amazon’s new legal drama, Goliath. Produced by LA-based content creation studio GenPop, the black and white intro starts with Goliath lead actor Billy Bob Thornton jumping into the ocean. While underwater, and smoking a cigarette and holding a briefcase, he casually strolls through rooms filled with smoke and fire. At the end of the open, he rises from the water as the Santa Monica Pier appears next to him and as the picture turns from B&W to color. The Silent Comedy’s “Bartholomew” track plays throughout.

The ominous backdrop, of a man underwater but not drowning, is a perfect visual description of Thornton’s role as disgraced lawyer Billy McBride. Yukich’s visuals, he says, are meant to strike a balance between dreamlike and menacing.

The approved concept called for a dry shoot, so Yukich came up with solutions to make it seem as though the sequence was actually filmed underwater. Shot on a Red Magnesium Weapon camera, Yukich used a variety of in-camera techniques to achieve the illusion of water, smoke and fire existing within the same world, including the ingenious use of smoke to mimic the movement of crashing waves.

After wrapping the live-action shoot with Thornton, Yukich edited and color corrected the sequence. The VFX work was mostly supplementary and used to enhance the practical effects which were captured on set, such as adding extra fireballs into the frame to make the pyrotechnics feel fuller. Editing was via Adobe Premiere and VFX and color was done in Autodesk Flame. In the end, 80 percent was live action and only 20 percent visual effects.

Once post production was done, Yukich projected the sequence onto a screen which was submerged underwater and reshot the projected footage. Though technically challenging, Yukich says, this Inception-style method of re-shooting the footage gave the film the organic quality that he was looking for.

Yukich recently worked as lead editor for Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade. Stepping behind the lens was a natural progression for Yukich, who began directing concerts for bands like Godsmack and The Hollywood Undead, as well as music videos for HIM, Vision of Disorder and The Foo Fighters.

The network of connected data centers known as “the cloud” is playing a greater role in many media and entertainment applications. This includes collaborative workflows and proxy viewing, rendering, content distribution and archiving. Cloud services can include processing power as well as various types of digital storage.

In the figure below, you will see Coughlin Associates’ projections (2015 Digital Storage in Media and Entertainment Report), for the growth of professional media and entertainment cloud storage out to 2020. Note that archiving is the biggest projected market for media and entertainment cloud storage.

Media and Entertainment Cloud Storage Capacity Projections

At the 2016 NAB show, there were many companies offering cloud storage and online services for the media and entertainment industry. Some of these were cloud-only offerings and some are hybrid cloud services with some on-premises storage.

In this piece, we will review some of these cloud storage offerings and take a look at how to move content around the cloud, as well as to and from the cloud and on-premise storage. There were also some interesting object storage infrastructure implementations that were of interest at the NAB show.

Archiving in the Cloud
Archive is the biggest application for cloud storage in media and entertainment and several companies have products geared toward these applications, some of them with magnetic tape storage in the cloud. Oracle’s DIVA content storage management software allows the integration of on-premises storage and the Oracle cloud. The recently announced DIVAnet 2.0 allows a converged infrastructure for rich media using single namespace access to DIVArchive on-premises sites and Oracle DIVA Cloud storage as a service.The Oracle Archive Cloud using DIVA content management offers archive storage for about $0.01/GB/month. This equates to storing 1 petabyte (PB) of content for just $12,000 per year. That is less than the on-premises costs for many content archives. At this price, rich media content companies are considering trusting their long-term content archives to the cloud.

Fujifilm’s Dternity tape-based archive, which offers online access to your data and integrates with applications already in your workflow, had an exhibit at NAB again this year. IBM also offers tape storage in the cloud. In addition to archiving on tape there are HDD cloud storage offerings as well. Major cloud companies such as Google, Azure and AWS offer tape and HDD- based cloud storage.

Quantum showcased its new Q-Cloud Vault long-term cloud storage service. This is fully integrated within workflows powered by StorNext 5.3, Q-Cloud Vault will provide low-cost, Quantum-managed “cold storage” in the public cloud. Because StorNext 5.3 enables end-to-end encryption, users can leverage the cloud as a part of their storage infrastructure to facilitate secure, cost-effective storage of their media content, both on-site and off-site.

Cloud-Assisted Media Workflows
In addition to archive-focused cloud storage, some companies at NAB were talking about cloud and hybrid storage focused on non-archive applications.

Fast-paced growth and strong demand for scale-out storage clouds have propelled DDN’s WOS to one of the industry’s top solutions based on the number of objects in production and have fortified DDN’s position as a strong market leader in object storage. Continuing to fuel the pace of its object storage momentum, DDN also announced the availability of its latest WOS platform release. WOS is also an important component in the company’s MediaScaler Converged Media Workflow Storage Platform.

EMC, Pixspan, Aspera and Nvidia are bringing uncompressed 4K workflows to IT infrastructures, advancing digital media workflows with full resolution content over standard 10GbE networks. Customers can now achieve savings and performance increases of 50-80 percent in storage and bandwidth throughout the entire workflow — from on-set through post to final assets. Artists and facilities using creative applications for compositing, visual effects, DI and more can now work faster with camera raw, DPX, EXR, TIFF and Cineon files. Content can be safely stored on EMC’s Isilon scale-out NAS for shared collaborative access to project data in the data center, around the world, or to the cloud.

NetApp StorageGrid Webscale

At NAB, NetApp promoted new features in its StorageGrid Webscale (appliance or software-defined) object storage. The object store has been widely adopted by media sites and media cloud providers who are managing tens of billions of media objects. Now, a majority of the key MAM, file-delivery and archive systems have integrated to StorageGrid Webscale’s Amazon S3 object interface. StorageGrid Webscale is a next-generation solution for multi-petabyte distributed content repositories. It provides erasure coding or, alternatively, automatic file copies to remote locations depending on the value of the media and the needs of the workflow.

Scality Ring storage scales linearly across multiple active sites and thousands of servers and can host an unlimited number of objects, providing high performance across a variety of workloads with file or object storage access. The company says the product enables organizations to build Exabyte-scale active archives and scalable content distribution systems, including network DVR/PVR. The product can be used to make a private storage cloud with file and object access and to provide customized web services.

Avere FlashCloud is a hybrid cloud and on-premise storage offering advertised as providing unlimited capacity scaling in the Cloud with unlimited performance scaling to the edge with up to 480 TB of data on FXT Series Edge filers. The dynamic tiering of active data to the edge hides the latency of cloud storage while NFS and SMB access provide file-based storage with a global namespace including public objects, private objects and NAS.

Avere’s FlashMove software transparently moves live online data to the cloud and between cloud providers. FlashMiror replicates data to the cloud for disaster recovery. AES-256 encryption with FIPS 140-2 compliance provides data security with on premise encryption key management. It should be noted that Avere worked with Google to provide the storage cluster used to stream the video showed at NAB during the Lytro Cinema demonstration.

Moving and delivering in the cloud

SAN Solutions SAN Metro Media ultra-low-latency cloud for media extends a customer’s studio to the cloud with its SMM Ultra-Connect dedicated, secure direct connect, low-latency circuit from the customer’s site to one of SAN Metro Media’s data centers in a metropolitan area. The SMM Ultra-Connect circuit can operate completely off the Internet and transport media at the bandwidth and latencies that large studio applications and workflows require.

Moving and Delivering Content in the Cloud
There are several companies offering data transport services to and from cloud services as well as from on-premise storage to the cloud and back.

At NAB show Aspera (a division of IBM) introduced FASPStream, a turnkey application-software line designed to enable live streaming of broadcast-quality video globally over commodity Internet networks with glitch-free playout and negligible startup time, reducing the need for expensive and limited satellite-based backhaul, transport and distribution.

The FASPStream software uses the FASP bulk data protocol to transport live multicast, unicast UDP, PCP or other file source video, providing timely arrival of live video and data independent of network round-trip delay and packet loss. The company says that less than five seconds of startup delay is required for 50Mbps video streams transported with 250ms round-trip latency and three percent packet loss. These properties are sufficient for 4K streaming between continents.

Aspera is part of a broader group of IBM acquisitions with a strong focus on the media and entertainment industry, including object storage provider Cleversafe.

Signiant announced the integration of its Manager+Agents product with the Avid Interplay | MAM system. Customers can now initiate accelerated file transfers from within Interplay | MAM, making it easier than ever to use the power of Signiant technology in support of global creative processes. Users can now initiate and monitor Signiant file transfers via the Export capability within Avid Interplay|MAM.

FileCatalyst had some media and entertainment case studies, including involvement with NBC’s 2016 Rio Olympics preparation.

Snowball is a PB-scale data transport solution that uses secure appliances to transfer large amounts of data into and out of the AWS cloud. With Snowball, you don’t need to write any code or purchase any hardware to transfer your data. Simply create a job in the AWS Management Console and a Snowball appliance will be automatically shipped to you. Once it arrives, attach the appliance to your local network, download and run the Snowball client to establish a connection, then use the client to select the file directories that you want to transfer to the appliance.

The client will then encrypt and transfer the files to the appliance at high speed. Once the transfer is complete and the appliance is ready to be returned, the E Ink shipping label will automatically update and you can track the job status via Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), text messages or directly in the Console.

EMC and Imagine Communications provide live channel playout with the Versio solution in an offering with EMC’s converged VCE Vblock system and EMC’s Isilon scale-out NAS storage system. EMC’s technology and Versio, Imagine’s cloud-capable channel playout solution, help to enable broadcasters to securely fulfill channel playout across geographically dispersed network to help engage customers with content tailored to their respective operations. EMC also talked about Cloud DVR solutions with Anevia.

Object Storage Infrastructure
A start-up company named Fixstars Solutions provides an innovative storage server (called Olive) with dual core-CPU, FPGA, 512MB RAM, gigabit Ethernet and up to 13TB of non-volatile flash memory storage in a 2.5-inch form factor. The company announced Ceph running on Olive, building high-performance, scalable storage systems at low cost that it feels can provide solutions for broadcasters, studios, cable providers and Internet delivery networks.

Dr. Tom Coughlin, president of Coughlin Associates, is a storage analyst and consultant with over 30 years in the data storage industry. He is the founder and organizer of the Annual Storage Visions Conference as well as the Creative Storage Conference. The 2016 Creative Storage Conference is June 23 in Culver City. It features conferences and exhibits focused on the growing storage demands of HD, UltraHD, 4K and HDR film production and how it is affecting every stage of the production.

Since Spike Lee first burst onto the scene back in 1986 with She’s Gotta Have It, he’s made over 60 films, documentaries, TV series and shorts, and tackled such timeless — and timely — subjects as racial tension, college fraternities, Malcolm X, the Son of Sam murder spree, jazz, blues and Hurricane Katrina.

Now Lee takes on guns and gangs in his upcoming new film Chi-Raq, an impassioned rap reworking of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, set against a backdrop of Chicago gang violence. Shot by Matty Libatique, who recently shot the equally gritty Straight Outta Compton, it features a large ensemble cast, including such regular Lee players as Samuel L. Jackson, Wesley Snipes and Angela Bassett, alongside newcomers to the Lee team Teyonah Parris, Nick Cannon, John Cusack, Dave Chappelle and Jennifer Hudson. The film showcases the director’s satirical point of view, at its most overtly political, “terrible-state-of-the-union” best.

Writer Iain Blair and Spike Lee.

I recently caught up with with Lee about making the film.

This is the first original movie from Amazon. How did that deal happen?
Last Sundance we tried to sell the film and everyone said no, except Amazon. All it takes is one yes!

How much pressure was there to get big stars in this?
Casting is always down to me. They wanted some names, some stars, but left it up to me. Sam and I go way back and I cast him as a sort of rapping Greek chorus, and then Angela and John Cusack because they bring that gravitas, and their characters are the moral foundation of the film. It was especially brave of Jennifer to play a mother who loses her child to gang violence, considering what she went through in real life —having three family members murdered in Chicago.

You co-wrote the script, with Kevin Willmott, in verse. Any concerns that audiences may find it a bit daunting?
No, as so many kids now have grown up with rap and spoken-word performance, and they know all about rhyming and meter. It’s all very familiar. We actually tried to do this six years ago, and then went back to it and set it in the South Side of Chicago, where we also shot it. That’s ground zero of the gang violence. While we were there, for five weeks, there were 331 people shot and 65 murdered — and it has escalated since then. We rushed to finish this film because we all feel it really can help save lives.

You don’t pull any punches about the terrible situation in Chicago and gun violence in general in the movie.
Look, it’s insane that more people are dying on the streets of Chicago than our soldiers in Iraq and other war zones. And it’s not just Chicago — it’s Baltimore, New York, LA, it’s all over the US. I don’t tell audiences what to think in my movies, but I’ve got to make an exception with this. I want people to think about guns in this country and all the killings. It’s insanity. Don’t come over to my house — I don’t want to take away everyone’s Second Amendment rights — but we need far tougher background checks and tougher laws.

The women in the film and play famously stop the bloodshed by withholding sex from their men.
And it’s pretty effective! (Laughs) Matty and I set out to make the movie look sexy, because how can you sell a sex strike to the men — or the audience — if no one looks sexy? I’ve been told that we’re just objectifying women. I disagree.

Do you like post?
I love it, because shootin’ a film is a motherfucker! (Laughs hard) People have NO idea how hard it is, making a film. It is no joke. The grind, the pressure, the hundreds of questions you get asked every day on the set. So post is when you can finally sit down and actually make your film. You’re like a sculptor, shaping and molding it, cutting out shit, adding shit. Sometimes you change the whole structure and look. You’ve got the footage and now you have to find the film. With anything I do, I end up flip-flopping some scenes, so it never follows the shooting script exactly, but that’s the great thing about post. It’s this journey of discovery.

You always post in Brooklyn, right?
Yes, at my 40 Acres and a Mule office.

The film was edited by Ryan Denmark and Hye Mee Na. Why two editors?
Simple — it made editing twice as fast. They were on the set in Chicago, so they could start cutting while I was shooting, and they’d pick scenes and cut. We didn’t divide it into action scenes and quieter scenes. We just flip-flopped every scene, and it worked out great because it’s pretty seamless. And that way we could accelerate the whole post schedule. We didn’t finish shooting until July 9, and the film’s coming out in December, so that’s very fast. Of course, once we got back to Brooklyn I was there every day working on the edit, and sometimes we worked a seven-day week to get it done. I’m very hands-on, but I’m not there looking over their shoulder while they cut. They cut a scene and then I look at it and give notes.

The film makes great use of all the tweets and other graphic elements that pop up.
Social media. You can’t ignore it, so I wanted to incorporate a lot of that. And apart from those tweets, there are a lot of visual effects in the movie — you just don’t see them for the most part. We had to do a lot of clean-up and removal work, and lots of detail work like bullet holes and so on. We did some of that in-camera, but then we amplified it in post.

Randy Balsmeyer was the VFX supervisor, and he’s worked with me since 1988 on School Daze, doing all my opening credits and title design. The company was Balsmeyer and Everett, but now it’s called Big Film Design, and he’s done a ton of work for everyone from Woody Allen to David Cronenberg and the Coens.

The sound and the music, by Terence Blanchard, are also key elements in this film.
Terence wrote a great score again. He’s done a lot of my films, and never been nominated. How come his score for Malcolm X was never nominated? He’s a magnificent composer, trumpeter, bandleader. I always put as much as emphasis on sound and music as I do on the acting and editing and cinematography and so on. It’s hugely important.

David Obermeyer was the sound designer and Phil Stockton did the re-recording mix. We did it at C5 Sound in New York. We spent quite a long time on the mix, even though we were rushing to finish it.

Where did you do the DI?
At Harbor Picture Company in New York. Matty supervised it and then I came in and made a few small adjustments, but Matty’s a master at all that. I’m not going to get in his way (laughs). [Editor’s Note: Harbor’s Joe Gawler provided color work via the DaVinci Resolve. Additional color was done Roman Hankewycz, and conform was Chris Farfan and Chris Mackenzie.The studio also provided ADR for the film.]

You’ve been nominated for two Oscars and you were just honored with the Governors Award. How important are all the awards?
They all help bring visibility to the films, and the Governors Award also gave me an opportunity to talk about diversity — or the lack of — in Hollywood. So it’s very important.

Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.

Amazon Studios’ original series Transparent has made history for its representation of the trans community, but it may be having an even bigger impact on the way the entertainment world does business. With 11 Emmy nominations — including for Outstanding Single-Camera Picture Editing for A Comedy Series — and five wins, Transparent validates the company’s original programming strategy as it goes head-to-head with the likes of HBO and Netflix. With Season 2 of Transparent set to “air” December 4, the show’s enthusiastic fan base (myself included) may be scheduling a weekend of pre-holiday binge watching.

Using an approach that’s been described as very “un-Hollywood,” Amazon Studios is setting out to change both the relationship between the studio and the creators — the studio is touting an openness to developing great stories from visionary directors and outsiders alike — and with audiences, by using innovative approaches to invite audience feedback. When Jill Soloway sold the Transparent pilot to Amazon in 2013, the studio had yet to make waves. With Transparent, Amazon Studios is now squarely on Hollywood’s map.

I spoke with veteran editor Catherine Haight, a long-time collaborator of Transparent’s creator Soloway, about her path as an editor and the experience of working on the show.

After majoring in art with a concentration in film at Occidental College, Haight began her career as a production assistant, then spent time logging footage and learning how a cutting room works before becoming an assistant editor. Haight began working with Soloway when she edited her short film Una Hora Por Favora, and then edited Soloway’s independent film Afternoon Delight (which premiered at Sundance in 2013). The two continued collaborating on Seasons 1 and 2 of Transparent. “Jill and I communicate well, and because we have a long history of working together, I know what she’s looking for,” Haight notes.

While Haight believes that the role of editor is mysterious to many, it’s a job she loves. “Editors are the first ones to see the puzzle come together and are huge contributors to the storytelling process — the first cut is always the editor’s cut. While some of the feedback we get can be granular, it’s usually more along the lines of ‘make this less over-the-top’ or ‘I’m not tracking this character’s emotional state.’ As editors, we manipulate perception to make the audience feel emotions.”

Cutting an Amazon Series
When I asked Haight about how working on an Amazon production differed from other projects, she noted that while the day-to-day was similar — the series was shot and cut at Paramount as a union project — the way Amazon engaged with Soloway was markedly different. “Amazon let us do our own thing. They definitely had thoughts and opinions and gave notes throughout the process, but overall they meddled less than I’ve seen with studios on other projects.”

With only five shooting days per episode, Soloway and the crew focused their attention on “bubble” scenes that were critical to moving the story forward. With more time to invest, the actors were encouraged to improvise more — if something in the script wasn’t working, it would be changed on the fly. Smaller scenes had more basic camera coverage, tended to stay closer to the original script and were shot with fewer takes. Because the show is shot documentary-style, no two takes are the same and blocking and dialogue frequently change from take to take, which can be a challenge in the edit room.

“We approached the project as a five-hour movie, not as 10 separate episodes” says Haight. “Because all of the episodes release at once, the writers structure the story so the audience wants to start the next episode right away.” Time limits per episode were less rigid than conventional shows — finished cuts could be anywhere between 22 and 30 minutes per episode — and the absence of ad breaks meant fewer constraints as well.

This approach offered new freedom for Haight as an editor. “We were able to move scenes from episode to episode to make the story track emotionally. For example, we were having difficulty getting Rita’s role in the family to be clear in Season 1. Josh goes to see her in the pilot episode, and in a later episode he confronts her to find out whether his parents knew about their sexual relationship. We were able to move scenes from three different episodes into one sequence — there were wardrobe changes all over the place, but it made sense emotionally, so it worked.”

Transparent tackles gender and sex in an explicit and direct way, but I asked Haight about her experience of gender in post production generally. “Jill’s work is all about creating the female gaze, so having a woman cutting makes sense. But I’ve had a range of experiences. Some men I’ve edited for have thought that women bring something different and unique to the table… it’s great working with men who are feminists. But almost 80 percent of the Editor’s Guild is male, so I make a point of mentoring younger women. It’s vital that we help each other.”